


Wasteland, Seize My Bones

by Tyellas



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mythic!Max, Supernatural Elements, Wasteland Magic, Worldbuilding, not done crying over Valkyrie, sometimes the Wasteland takes you, we who wander this wasteland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5846467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Wasteland - it's not alive. Or is it? Short pieces united by the Wasteland. <i>Wasteland Love</i> - The Immortan and his frustrating relationship with the Wasteland. <i>Wasteland Magic</i> - Furiosa and Valkyrie talk about ghosts and what Wasteland magic might be. <i>Wasteland Story</i> - Max is accused of being a scout for the Immortan - by an echo of his younger, better self.</p><p>New installment: <i>Wasteland Souls</i> - Troubled by a warning from Corpus, Cheedo turns to the Citadel's women to find out: what <i>is</i> the Wasteland?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wasteland Love

The Wasteland used to be good to the Immortan.

Colonel Joe Moore had lost the battles for oil and water, but he’d never lose the battle for survival. He and his hangers-on had endured hallucinatory years in the urban hot zones. They’d witnessed book burnings, gang wars, mobs lynching those who wore uniforms, no matter what order or mercy they brought. He’d taken his lot bush, in search of something more. But nuclear summer had made the Outback land into dust bowl and desert. Red sand and ochre stone. A wasteland.

The Wasteland.

Still, after the Fall, the Wasteland’s nothing was better than the horror of used-to-be. From luck and nothing, he could make a world again. And he had.

Gastown oil? Bullet Farm metal? Aquifer water? They slept for aeons beneath the Wasteland, waiting for him. He claimed them as his due. There was no alternative, nothing else to keep humanity from rejoining the animals. Civilization would blow out in the world without them. Without him. He knows he is better than the ones he left behind, rotting, scavenging savages: he has gratitude for what he has claimed.

Now that he is Immortan, he extends his hand to the Wasteland. He takes in its sons and daughters: softens their lives with the promise of Valhalla, the hope of breeding new life with him. He sends irreplaceable sacrifices, V8s and lesser motors, to the Thunderdome every Amnesty. Nods from a world-maker to his raw material, to those waiting to be chosen.

And what is his reward? Attempts to sow the land near the Citadel go nowhere. The Wasteland air gains a stink to go with its post-nuclear sear. The population out there shrinks, the Wretched cluster ever desperate, ever more. And no breeder, for thirty oldyears, has been pure enough to carry a worthy son for him.

Once in a while, he allows himself to be Joe Moore again, to get _damn pissed_ that the Wasteland doesn’t appreciate what he tries to do. Then, he corrects himself.

The Wasteland -

\- the sands and stones beneath his heel –

\- it’s not alive. It can’t love. Cannot hate.

Yet he feels in his bones that it _wants_.

Like a mad Wife, the Wasteland wants all of him. Wants him flesh, and animal, and dead. Every time he leaves the Citadel, it tries to stake its claim on him. Pebbles bounce and snap on the Gigahorse’s precious windscreen, scream in its brake rotors. Ripping winds burn his lungs. The hammering sun cooks his skin. Sandstorms send the ground up to embrace him, grinding into all his crevices. It even sneaks into his councils, warnings from Corpus or Gastown or the scouts, about sour earth, aquifer drawdown, claims and dreams older than his own. Weak words, too like the echo in his bones. He thrusts them aside.

He’s one step ahead of the Wasteland’s stony hunger, sealing off his skin and his very lungs, hardening his troops to its rigors, tightening the water flow. And it’s less and less use. When the great storms come, it’s his name the wind howls. The Wasteland will not be content until its sand violates the empty halves of his pelvis. Until everything he has done is nothing.

It doesn’t have to be that way. After his lifetime of godhood, Joe feels his hunger for life and power as love. He’d give that to the Wasteland, if it would stop trying to take him down at every turn. If it would let him be Immortan.


	2. Wasteland Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a difficult moment with Max, Valkyrie shows Furiosa the nature of Wasteland magic...and haunting.

Furiosa gave up. “If you need air, Max, try the Skullmouth. Leave this room and go left three times.”

He paused in his pacing, looked over his shoulder. Gave a nod, and a grunt, and slipped out.

He didn’t want her along, then.

Furiosa lay back against an ancient leather sofa, its hide cracked and cool in the night. Yet again, she questioned her decision to take the Citadel rooms that had once housed the Immortan. Max had seemed to take it in stride – enough to stay all night, last night. Two hours ago, they’d eaten off the same plate in those rooms, sitting close but not touching. They’d been drawing out a practical, dry conversation that their eyes were turning into tinder. When they touched, it was going to be on again.

But, as the moon had risen, and Furiosa began to trust the night’s quiet, Max had backslid. Staring into space, going twitchy, muttering about getting some air. The moment Furiosa took him at his word, he was gone. At least he couldn’t bolt for the Wasteland at this time of the night. There was no leaving the Citadel’s heights until the morning.

Furiosa unfastened her prosthetic, rubbed the lines the straps left in her flesh, then her dented, scarred cheekbone. Second thoughts on his part - she wouldn’t blame him. Trying to understand him made her temples cramp. She closed her eyes.

Behind her, a woman’s musical, deepish voice said, “It wasn’t anything you did. Nothing in here. He wants to be here, with you, but tonight, he’s haunted. See where he walked.”

Furiosa levered herself up and looked. Where Max had paused, there was an ochre bootprint on the floor. She went and examined the reddish mark. Perhaps blood had come off Max’s boot treads in the Citadel’s humidity. No, the print was Wasteland sand and pebbles. A shiny chip caught Furiosa’s eye. She pressed it into her right index finger and lifted it to see. Before she could find more light, her friend spoke again. “You don’t need it, with this moonlight. You can see what you need to. He can, too. It’s a night for spirits.”

Furiosa vented an impatient huff as she turned to her friend, sitting on a deep windowsill, a cloak-wrapped outline in the moonlight. “Val. Please. I have enough problems here without buying into Wasteland magic. If I take one story of a ghost or a curse or a vision seriously, it’ll never stop.” Besides, if there were ghosts, her mother would have haunted her. After the third day, Mary Jobassa had been utterly gone – Furiosa had clung to her in the crude rattling transport, her mother’s corpse heavy and empty in her skinny young arms.

“I remember your father used to tell ghost stories. Good ones. He was from…that Before-time place, far away. That other tribe.” Furiosa glanced away, into one of the room’s dark corners. “I’ve forgotten so much.”

“From across the Salt and the sea.” Valkyrie’s voice stayed forgiving. “We used to rail against your mum and my dad, eh? Bloody strict oldies. We were going to be better than them. Then we turn into them… come and sit by me.”

Valkyrie shifted into the shadowy side of the deep sill, making room on her right. Sitting down, Furiosa brushed against Valkyrie’s cloak collar, made of the feathers Valkyrie always found, everywhere. Furiosa had found a feather exactly once in her life. “It was different, for us, out in what became the Wasteland. Let me tell you what I know, about Wasteland magic.”

Furiosa made a gruff noise, but she lifted her left shoulder and cupped Valkyrie’s head to roll their foreheads together. It was so easy to touch her, as if they had never parted for seven thousand days. They stayed cheek to cheek for Val’s whispered telling.

“Wasteland magic. It’s not real until you’re in amongst it.”

“It’s when you’re alone in the dunes and the wind has a voice. Your mouth turns to sour metal. The air feels wrong. You know there’s a hot zone nearby. You’re parched, exhausted, seeing water that isn’t there. Crows are following you – first one, then three, then too many. At last, you find what you need, and it feels like a miracle.”

“Another time, you meet a scarred wanderer with a white eye. You can’t forget them. You can’t remember your dead child’s face anymore, but you’ll never forget theirs. Did they curse you? Point the bone at you?”

“Or, it’s the heart of the night, and it’s so cold, you feel the stars’ light in your bones. You’re ready to lie down to join those stars, and dying along the way doesn’t matter.”

“It’s being haunted by the friend who used to ride on your left, always on your left. She’s been shot down, days and days ago, yet her shadow’s still in the sand beside you.”

Valkyrie’s cool words carried the rhythm of her Wasteland life. Despite the grimness, Furiosa went still with longing. And was Valkyrie the rider? Had Furiosa’s absence haunted, in turn, when she had been dead to the Vuvalini? Sometimes those Citadel years had felt like a living death.

Valkyrie inclined against her, length to length. As if she pulled the thoughts from Furiosa’s breath, she said, “You’re so warm. The sun’s still coming off your skin.”

Furiosa folded Valkyrie in her left arm and leaned into the light mass of her hair. It was silky and stiff, like the collar. Valkyrie’s presence soothed and slaked and tempted, all at the same time, in a haze of rightness. She shivered at the sliding touches, different from Max’s weighty, musky heat. 

Reading her mind again, Valkyrie murmured, “Your Wasteland bloke. He’s an edgy one. We haven’t talked lately, but then, haven’t tried, eh. I didn’t want to upset him.”

“He’d listen. He’s good like that.” Furiosa hoped he still was. If Max came back soon, this could get difficult - or very interesting.

“He was good on the road. Saving your Rig and you all those times. Watching over us on the bike, even when we’d fallen. Killing the People Eater.” Valkyrie gave a dry, fierce chuckle. “I owe him for that one.”

“We all do.”

“I'm glad you're here, where there’s a future. Some green.” Val clenched Furiosa’s left hand harder. “I wish I could stay.”

“Are you going with Max?" The thought stabbed Furiosa twice. 

The shake of Val’s head slid her hair against Furiosa’s left cheek. “We turn into our parents. Later or sooner.”

“Val, your father's dead –“

Furiosa snapped her mouth shut, too late. She remembered. Valkyrie had been dead for months. The scant weight on Furiosa’s left shoulder, the light rancid dryness she inhaled, was dead hair and dusty feathers and a body dessicated to a shell in the Wasteland sun.

Dead, yet present.

The haze of rightness thinned. Furiosa went absolutely still, desperate to keep the ghost, the vision, whatever Wasteland magic had come to her.

Valkyrie retained the clear voice of a perfect memory. “I have to go.”

“No. Please.” The words of the desperate girl Furiosa had been once, jounced in a crude transport. She closed her eyes in denial, even as she tightened a desperate arm around Val’s sliding shoulders.

Valkyrie’s right hand in her left one was cool skin and bones, strong enough to squeeze back. “It’s time. I owe him. I love you. I’m giving you --“

Furiosa nearly jumped out of her skin as the electric lights flashed on. Though only half the bulbs came to life, they were enough to warm the room, shrinking the shadows. She was back on the sofa, her face and left arm-stump pressed to the sofa’s dry hide. There was an apologetic noise.

“’S me. Max.” He stood by the light switch, his face smoothed of its earlier tension. Furiosa remembered how quiet he could be. “Asleep? Sorry. Didn’t mean –“

Valkyrie had been there, Furiosa had reached out two living arms to hold her. She had clenched Val with her left hand. Her dead hand. She folded her stump arm in with all its grief and phantom-pain, pressing its end against her aching heart.

Was Max’s haunting like that? Had he, too, seen and heard someone while knowing them dead, been racked with pain he couldn’t bear to end?

No wonder he fled towards their shadows in the Wasteland.

As understanding cracked her open, Max knelt beside her. “You hurt? Bleeding?”

He cupped Furiosa’s right hand. Red-ochre sand clung to her sweating skin. Before he brushed it away, a shimmering fragment in it caught her eye: one tiny, iridescent feather.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A companion piece to another story of mine - if you want to see who Max finds on the Skullmouth balcony, it's in [The Virtue of the Road.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4591761/chapters/10460532)


	3. Wasteland Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max and his Wasteland stories collide with a fighter who echoes his younger, better self. Seared with the Citadel brand, accused of being a raiders’ scout, he’s got to explain …or die.

_Timelessly the sand swept toward him, its shifting contours, approximating more closely than any other landscape he had found to complete psychic zero, enveloping his past failures and uncertanities, masking them in its enigmatic canopy…_ – J.G. Ballard, The Cage of Sand

 

Max didn’t tell stories about the Wasteland. Some days, it had been hard enough to remember himself. His mind shifted like the Wasteland dunes, now uncovering memories and pain, now burying them. When he needed to hold on, he’d recount his own story, in his mind, as much as he could stand to.

_Once, I was a cop; a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me...or everyone else._

Max didn’t have to tell stories about the Wasteland. Other Wastelanders did it for him. He gleaned them from his enemies’ ranting.

_Ty che, suka? Filth! Desecrater! Cursed like the ground, sick like all flesh. Cook your brain in the sun, sand take you - otva`li, mu`dak, b`lyad!_

He sifted them, warily, from the verbal dross other wanderers offered up. Never a name, never any clear meaning – every word was a risk or a hint that someone might snap, traitor you.

_You’re in a hurry, stranger. There’s nowhere to go, any more. The world is psychic zero. Done and undone. Start again, every day…die a little more, every night…what does it matter?_

What sounded like reason could hide the deepest Wasteland madness beneath: that of terrible adaptation. Stories to flee.

_Don’t give me the steel eye like that, mate. Times are tough in our nowhere land. Salvage’s getting rare. Food’s getting rarer. A kilo of biltong for your aqua-cola, and no more questions. What? What kind of biltong? Mate, if you have to ask…_

His stumble into someone else’s Wasteland story had brought him a touch of sanity. With the redeemed Citadel behind him, he roamed with half a purpose. Now, he uncovered the Wasteland’s salvage, material and human, and brought it back to a place that held some life. From this, he was rebuilding himself: becoming Max again.

_Since you brought me in? Well, before the Fall, I taught. History. Ecology. Science. Mere wordburgers in the Wasteland. Your Sisters, they want to know. I worry it’s too little, too late. Still, this Citadel’s rock consoles me. This mineral life around us is proof that, however slowly, the world will go on._

Rock? He’d given the old teacher a half-smile and dredged up his last name: Rockatansky.

Today’s journey had Max in that element. By Citadel reckoning, he was somewhere north. He drove through red country. Layered hills had been sculpted by toxic storms into waves of rolling beauty, dunes rippling between them. The still sky was an even blue, vibrating in the unbroken heat. He kept moving, the wind of his passage allowing him to breathe.

In the humming noontide, Max paused at the top of a rise hemmed by cliffs. Somehow, the country around was gathered up and through this passage point – an old road beneath the sand and scree, or the lure of some shade in the tilted cliffs. Probably both.

White marks on the cliff faces caught his eye. Max drove over. Despite the half-shade of the angled stone, the heat had a roasting quality to it. He dared to shed his jacket and leave it in the car. The white marks filled him with a rare sensation: anticipation that was not fear. Would he see what he hoped?

For once in his life, he did.

The white marks on the cliffs were not Wasteland graffiti. This was art, limned in white and ten shades of ochre. It began old and faded, a layered collage of people and animals. Then came the worn, detailed outline of something Max barely knew: a ship. Ghostly, skull-like faces filled the ship’s wake. Next, white and vivid, came a wild crosshatching, like a net of destruction. More people and animals followed, their skeletons pale and dark inside them. And, at the end, one silhouette, that of a handprint with a crooked little finger. It was a story. But Max couldn’t tell what the ending meant.

The sands inside Max shifted. A dark man’s face came to mind. Max owed that man the little he knew about the rock art before him. He was dead, and his name silenced forever. Sweat dripping from his eyes (he told himself), Max removed the black scarf Furiosa had given him to wipe his face. Then he left his head bowed, letting the sun sear his untanned neck, remembering: one of many he had failed.

_They are long dead. I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead. Hunted by scavengers. Haunted by those I could not protect –_

BAM. A stony impact, a red flash of pain on the left side of his head. Max went down on his bad knee, skull ringing. Max shook his head and rose, turning, directly into the leather-wrapped bruiser waiting for him.

A road warrior, like him, broader, more cruelly equipped. Max glimpsed bone, shark teeth, spikes. Attacking out of nowhere, still stashing his slingshot. Max had been _standing still,_ turned his back on his gear, for one moment. He must have been followed. The fighter was blocking Max from his own, rearing between him and the car. But Max had its key, and he’d swallow that key and vomit it up again later before he gave up his V8.

The fighter was masked. Max could tell he was younger because he attacked, instead of waiting. Max eluded, rolled to get the advantage of low-down gravity, and got a smooth follow and a handful of sand in his face for his trouble. Anger chilled him. That was his move, using the Wasteland.

_I exist in this Wasteland…A man reduced to a single instinct: survive._

The fighter wouldn’t expect it if he rolled back in, all the way into his knees to bowl him down. Max kept rolling on top of him, drawing a knife in a fluid motion. He elbowed the fighter’s throat, heard him choke, and clawed leather armor out of the way for a strike. Max hadn’t been the only one to loosen leathers in the terrible day, and a hard-boiled slit-eyed mask flew aside, leaving his opponent blinking.

Leaving Max gazing into another man’s face, dark and deep-eyed as the man he’d been remembering.

Disorientation was loss. With a shout for his life, the fighter heaved them both upright, a knee in Max’s crotch, and tossed him away. Max’s back hit the sand.

The fighter spat one word. “Citadel!”

The world spun. Max had been wrong. This man was the enemy of his dead enemy. The Citadel's news hadn't reached this place, yet. He was battling with everything he had against a possible Citadel scout – an advance raider for the Immortan, raider of men, thief of children and women. Max levered up onto his good knee, both hands up.

“No. Not Citadel! It’s -”

The fighter went to kick Max in the solar plexus. If Max hadn’t been scrambling back already, his ribs would have staved in. The fighter roared, “Guzzed up and branded! Their story, all over you.” Max kept moving back. They both saw Max’s knife on the ground between them at the same time. The fighter stomped the knife underfoot. “I am here to protect against you.”

This was someone like Max used to be. Young and angry, strong and desperate, with a world to defend. Max knew he should be a dead man. But this fighter was talking, looking at his face. Max went unmasked in the Wasteland for a reason. Every moment another man saw your eyes was two more moments that you’d live.

Max stayed locked to the watching eyes to rasp, “I’ll leave. I’ll go.”

The fighter’s laugh was bitter. “You’ll go. Then come back with war…”

He shook his head. “Not to the Citadel. To the Wasteland.”

The fighter looked even more furious. “This isn’t the Wasteland! There is no Wasteland!”

Max went still, his veins cold. Of all the madness he’d heard about the Wasteland, this was the craziest. Very carefully, he repeated, “It’s not the Wasteland?” And waited, to hear what it should be. Those more mad than himself always talked more.

Nothing was forthcoming.

Instead, the man was vibrating like the lattice of destruction on the stone, torn between Max’s surrender and his own policing. “You don’t know where you are. You say you’re not what I see. Prove you aren’t Citadel! One chance!”

Max stayed in his crouch. He shook off his vest and shirt, revealed the rough tattooed words that marred his back. And forced himself, for once, to tell their story.

“Citadel’s prisoner. Branded. Marked so they’d know how to use me. Blood and body.” Max had no idea if the man could read. Part of him hoped not. He tilted his head and traced along his neck, fingers tracking his cannula scars.

The fighter took his measure. “That’s bloody fucked.”

“Mmmm.” This man even cursed the old-fashioned way Max did. “Immortan’s dead.”

“That’s how you got out?”

“Mmmm.” That entire story was such Wasteland madness that Max left it.

There was a long, simmering moment. Max let the knife stay gleaming under the other man’s curiously scant footgear. It was a mistake to hope to hear words he, himself, had said too rarely. Yet Max caught the kind of breath he heard himself huff, when he found himself giving in to some craziness. The man said, “Wastelander…”

Max inhaled.

“Take your skin. Get out. Forget you were here. No story.”

“I was never here.” If this wasn’t the Wasteland, he didn’t exist. Max slowly took back his shirt and vest. He trusted the other man enough to take ten seconds to stuff himself back into the thinning fabric. After that, he staggered to the car, never turning his back, doing his utmost to not be a mistake. The slam of the car door separated them.

Max sent his vehicle screaming out, over the tracks he’d left before. Barred from what had been and what was going to be, fleeing back to the Wasteland he knew. The better man behind him, and the names he’d never know, would soon be lost in the sands.

 

 _“_ _Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun but also a proper noun. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person ….Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life.”_ Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Acknowledgement of Country: This story represents Aboriginal land and arts. It is the author's intent to depict this respectfully and to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and creators of such arts.
> 
>  _Ty che, suka_ = Russian - are you crazy?
> 
>  _otva`li, mu`dak, b`lyad!_ = Russian - Fuck off, you asshole, fuck!
> 
>  _biltong_ = Unseasoned dried meat. South African term, widely used Down Under.


	4. Wasteland Souls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Troubled by a warning from Corpus, Cheedo tries to find out: what _is_ the Wasteland? She turns to the Citadel's women to find out, but never gets the same answer twice...

Cheedo had always been told that the world had fallen. That scarcely any refuges like their home, the Citadel, remained. That it was a Wasteland out there.

To Cheedo, it felt so good to be back. They were all working together to run the Citadel, now. Cheedo and her Sisters, Milking Mothers, Wretches brought up from down below, the Citadel's many workers, and the few who had survived the Immortan’s downfall. Like the Immortan’s oldest son, with a powerful mind in his unfortunate body; Corpus Colossus.

Cheedo knew Corpus talked more to her than to the other Sisters. She had just closed the valves on the pipes downstairs, happy to give a visiting convoy some water. Corpus had watched her, from the rolling chair that gave him mobility, then spoken up.

“The Wasteland is our enemy. You know that, right? If they think we’re weak, they’ll attack. They want what we have. Aqua-cola. Green. People like you.” Corpus paused, wheezed, caught his breath. “They can’t keep giving water out to all comers…it’s seen as weakness. Soon someone will try to take it from you. Pa understood that. You’re smart—like him. Show you’re strong. Take control. Save us all…”

Cheedo went rigid. “What do you mean, Corpus?”

Corpus’ blue eyes, the only sharpness about his irregular form, turned up to her. “I think you know.”

And then Cheedo felt stupid, because she didn’t.

What Corpus didn’t know about the Citadel, it was said, wasn’t worth knowing. There was something bigger, wrapped around Corpus’ fears. And she didn’t think Corpus truly knew about it.

What was the Wasteland? Who was out there?

Cheedo had been raised in the Citadel. Nobody had said much about what the Wasteland was, only that it was awful. The Immortan had said he was sparing them from it. As a child in the Citadel’s gardens, she’d needed to believe him was to gaze out at the heat-baked landscape away from the Citadel’s green.

She had spent time in the Vault, learning with the History Woman, but dear Miss Giddy had been so old she rarely said _Wasteland_. She spoke, confusingly, of the Outback and the Australia, settlements and cities, a Melbourne and a Perth. When she'd told them about who killed the world, Cheedo had barely taken it in. Angharad and Toast had always started talking a lot when that came up, loud and angry, whether they agreed or disagreed.

She wanted to ask Max, but he had driven off again. There had to be something out there, if he never stayed at the Citadel.

She could ask the History Man, but…

Cheedo decided she didn’t want to ask any man at all.  She’d only ask women. The Citadel sheltered many women who had lived in the Wasteland. They would tell her the truth.

Cheedo’s path away took her by some of the former Milking Mothers. That Milking Mother, there, the one giving orders: she had been one of the Wives of the Immortan before, stolen from the Wasteland to breed strong sons. She would know. When the cluster of Milking Mothers split up to go their own ways, Cheedo approached her. “Tidda? Can I ask you something?”

“Always, Sister.”

“You’re from outside the Citadel.” Tidda inclined her dark crown of braids in dignified acknowledgement. “What—what is the Wasteland? What is it really?”

Tidda’s deep eyes widened, then went distant. She hummed to herself. Finally, she sat on a bench and patted the spot beside her. Cheedo perched, comforted by Tidda’s substantial, sheltering presence. “You sense that there is more than this simple place tells you. I will tell you the truth about the Wasteland. You and I, we might be blood sisters, some lost generation back. See?” Tidda held her brown arm next to Cheedo’s. Cheedo pressed her tawny wrist to the other woman’s soft skin, smiling.

The older woman said, all firm seriousness, “This what the family I was stolen from knows, as traditional people of this place. If you are in the Wasteland, you are cursed.”

“Cursed!”

“I have made you pay attention. Good. The curse is that _that_ is the way you see the world around you—the world away from this Citadel—as a wasteland. You could be standing next to me, out there, yet we are not in the same place. Because this land around us, it is no Wasteland. It is country. Our country.” Tidda said this tenderly, urgently. “What little we have still, this country gave to us. We must give back to it.”

“But—there’s nothing out there. We killed the world.” Cheedo flashed back to the long drive of the Fury Road, its stones and swamps, worst of all the terrifying sand dunes that went on and on. “It was all empty or sour. Hot and dry and…nothing.” As awful and unimaginable as her grief for Angharad had been.

Tidda shook her head. “There is more out there than you saw.” She laid a hand on her own belly, tender again. “It must be done. For the sake of our children. Perhaps, if we keep the lines going, our children will be the ones to do it.”

“Your children,” Cheedo repeated, staring at Tidda’s hand. Realizing what her gentle gesture meant.

Cheedo thanked her and left. It had to have gotten worse since Tidda was in the Wasteland, Cheedo decided. If Tidda was going to have a child, it was too cruel to tell her how bad it really was.

There was another woman she could ask. To those born and bred in the Citadel, like Cheedo, the ones called Wretches might as well have been Wastelanders. Amongst the Wretches, there had been those who, though half-life or mutant, still had knowing and talent to spare. The new Citadel gave them their due.

Cheedo found the one she sought in one of the Citadel archives. A woman was at a table, working intently on a complex map. She was the same small height as Toast, but spindly, and named for a Before-time creature: Rabbit. She lifted her face to Cheedo, though the lower half of it stayed concealed behind a half-mask. “Can I help?”

“You’re from outside the Citadel? That’s where you met the History People, when they were Wretched?” Rabbit nodded, and lowered her dark-eyed gaze. Cheedo felt bad, making her talk: behind the mask, her mouth was twisted with a mutation. “I don’t mean to be a bother. I have some questions. About the Wasteland.”

With a freckled hand, Rabbit gestured to the seat beside her.

Cheedo tried a friendly smile. “What did the Wretches say about the Wasteland? Did they say it was cursed?”

Rabbit began to explain. Older Wretches, like the History People, remembered the Before-Time. They told that humans had broken the world by abusing guzzoline and tech. The Fall had tipped this over with a massive war: the nuclear bombs that made everything fukushima. Their force and energy had changed the world terribly. It was so bad that the shielding part of the sky was broken, letting hard light hammer down to mutate survivors more. Global warming met nuclear winter, then an endless nuclear summer. Climate crash storms swept away Before-time buildings and good soil alike. Sterile dryness had taken over this entire part of the world, which had been Australia. Survivors had called it the Wasteland for thousands of days.

Cheedo swallowed bitter understanding. “So that’s why people came to the Citadel. Even when it was bad under the Immortan.” It didn’t just look bad out there. It really was.

Rabbit nodded, again, then probed: who had said something about a curse?

Cheedo flushed. “Somebody said something.”

Rabbit repeated that the Wasteland could be explained with reason and history. She dropped her lisping voice to a warped, sibilant whisper. “But people are differenth. They don’t alwayth make sssense.” Cheedo leaned in and went cold at what she learned.

Sometimes, the Wasteland took Wretches. Their hearts and souls would be called by the empty lands, and they would go. They went to find the places without names. It was against reason, to leave the little they had for the nothing out there. They did it anyway. It was terrible, for you would never see them again, or know if they lived or died. “It ith lucky that you ssSisters came back, from out there.”

Cheedo added, “And Furiosa!”

Rabbit’s dark eyes went anguished, and her strange voice fell silent. Cheedo said thank you again and left.

Rabbit had lived so close to death and violence, Cheedo thought, in the bad days under the Immortan. Perhaps the Wretches had made the Wasteland strange and fearful to give themselves another reason to stay at the base of the Citadel.

Cheedo fled the Citadel’s insides as if she could outrun history. Her light feet took her to corridors in the Citadel’s outer layer, where she could breathe. The Vuvalini, she thought. They were real Wastelanders, the most out of anybody in the Citadel. The Wasteland had been nothing but terror for Cheedo until Furiosa had brought them to the Vuvalini. If anyone could make sense of it, without aching impossibilities, they could.

To find one of the old women, she had to go to the southernmost point of the great tower, to a sentry’s lookout peering out over empty lands. The Vuvalini there, on watch with a scoped rifle, greeted her easily. “Hey, Cheedo-chook. What’s wrong?”

Cheedo looked down at her toes, abashed. “I’m trying to find out about the Wasteland. What it really is.”

After a diffident huff, she replied, “Of all the things to ask. Truly...I’ve been trying to forget. It was hammering us down. Time was losing meaning. I’ve been out of it hundreds of days, now. The things we did to survive out there...I’m glad you don’t have to do them.” She gave Cheedo a cocky, lopsided smile. “It’s another world up here, thanks to you. The best thing we can do is help keep it that way.” She hefted her rifle.

This was drawing back to what Corpus had said. And his words had been the easiest to understand out of anyone’s.

The Vuvalini looked over Cheedo’s shoulder. “Oi, Furi! Your little sister here wants to know: what is the Wasteland?” Cheedo perked up as her friend and protector approached.

Furiosa strode up to them, then past them. She was magnetically drawn to the edge of the lookout, where she stared at the horizon. “I don’t know. After all this time. I don’t...really...know.” Furiosa’s voice was low and soft, like she was talking to herself. “Should I find out?”

Her eyes differed from all the other women’s. Sometimes, Furiosa’s eyes were green, like the Citadel’s gardens. Now, they caught the hard light and reflected it back, fearless, to flash the same color as the Wasteland sky.

Seeing Furiosa gazing out, Cheedo felt everything the women had told her about the Wasteland spiral together.

The country, its call or curse, the need to defend. The way the awful nothing out there had room for whatever was inside you. For Cheedo, it had been fear.  For the others, it was dreaming, history, weariness. She remembered seeing Furiosa, ready to steal her and her Sisters away to the Wasteland, eyes alight then, too. Hearing Furiosa say one word to Max on the Fury Road: _redemption_.

Cheedo’s heart sank. After all that, Corpus had been right. She would have to be strong. The people in the Citadel—the Mothers, the frail, the weary—did need to be defended. And the Wasteland was her enemy: for it was going to take Furiosa away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on an exchange on the very last page of the last _Mad Max_ comic from 2015! Corpus says some of his lines here to a young woman who remains mostly unseen....
> 
> This story was originally published in an eponymous _Mad Max_ zine I produced in 2017.


End file.
